01 / The operating case
What changes in a real workflow?
An analyst approves an agent’s proposed $8,400 payment to vendor A. The agent later changes the amount to $84,000 or the payee to vendor B before submission.
- 01Authority origin
- 02Task and grant
- 03Current decision
- 04Observed outcome
02 / Decision contract
What the executor must check
Canonicalize the request before approval and bind actor, task, operation, target, amount, currency, payee, policy context and expiry to the approval artifact. Re-evaluate current grant and policy when the agent resumes; reject a changed request.
03 / Failure and evidence
What goes wrong, and what can be proven?
The executor checks only that “a human approved payments” and allows a modified or replayed transaction.
Retain approval actor, timestamp, displayed request digest, expiry, decision ID, consumed status, executor attempt and observed financial state.
04 / Canonical scope
Why this reference stands alone
Human approval for agent actions explains the role of a reviewer; this page owns parameter binding, expiry and reuse prevention.
Implementation review / distinct boundary
The approver must see what the executor will see.
An approval UI should show the consequence-bearing fields, not a model-written summary alone. The artifact should refer to the normalized request and a time-bounded task. When execution resumes, the caller should recheck both that artifact and the current authority chain. A valid signature on an old approval does not make a revoked grant valid again.
task: invoice I-42 actor: finance agent F-7 action: payment.release target: account A / vendor A / USD 8,400 expires: task window; single-use request digest: hash(canonical fields)
Display
Show action, target, amount or data scope, initiating principal and policy exception to the reviewer.
Bind
Use one canonical request digest and expiry; define whether the approval is single-use.
Resume
Re-evaluate after the human acts, and reject changed arguments, expired artifacts and consumed approvals.
Source context: primary specification or guidance ↗. The worked test and mapping are ProofGrid analysis.
Continue with the runtime authorization library for neighboring decision and execution questions.
Primary references